This is a March playlist

With some modest life updates

Good morning.

I hope everyone had a good weekend.

This month has flown by. It was SXSW here in Austin, but you could’ve fooled me. Most of March, for me, was spent planning things in my personal life.

The main thing I spent time thinking about was patience. Being more patient at work, being more patient with my partner, being more patient with life, being more patient with myself.

I often think about the character Pete Campbell from Mad Men and how I never want to be like him. And so I often think about the moment when Don Draper says to Pete, “I know you want everything the minute you want it. Sometimes it's better to wait until you’re ready.”

Here’s a playlist for you—if you like that kind of thing. As I’ve said before, I’d write these even if nobody reads them.

Good luck out there this week.

“Magnolia Mountain” by Ryan Adams & The Cardinals

Can’t really talk about Ryan Adams anymore, but there was a period of time from about 2004-2014 where the music he made was incredibly important to me.

In 2005, specifically, he announced he was releasing three albums. Those albums ended up being the double album Cold Roses, the country homage Jacksonville City Nights, and the singer-songwriter record 29. During that time he also released a few “joke” albums under pseudonyms—like Hillbilly Joel by The Shit, which is also an incredibly important piece of art to me. Cold Roses and Jacksonville City Nights are two all-time albums for me.

I listened to both of them countless times driving around Saratoga Springs or in the dark to and from Long Island on Interstate 87. “Magnolia Mountain” is the opening track of Cold Roses and it sets the tone for one of the most ambitious years in Adams’s career—apparently he released 5 albums in both 2022 and 2024.

“Fist of Flowers” by Hamilton Leithauser

A friend of mine, shocked by the fact I listed Everybody Wants Some!!! (2016) as one of my best movies of the last 10 years (totally fine, we need visionaries like myself for a reason), sent me the trailer for Eephus (2024) and told me I’d probably like it. I watched the trailer and said, “Cool, they used a Hamilton Leithauser” song. He wrote back: Who’s that? He’s 8 years younger than me, so this made sense. I told him that Hamilton Leithauser was the lead singer of The Walkmen and was incredibly important to men who are now 39-49 years old. I got a laugh out of that one.

Hamilton Leithauser is back with a new album. It might be his best one as a solo artist and it certainly stands up with the best of the Walkmen albums. Plus, get this: It's just 30 minutes long. Now, that’s a true artist. Maybe it’s me or maybe it’s Leithauser but whenever I hear his voice, a shock of electricity goes through my body and I’m 22 years old again and everything feels as if I’m about to realize something important for the first time in my life and nobody can stop me from sitting in a bar for a little longer than I probably should.

“Nobody ’Cept You” by Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan comes up a lot in my group chat with my childhood friends. Probably because one of them is obsessed with him. I was helping said friend, who claims to be obsessed with Bob Dylan, figure out what songs were on each disc of The Bootleg Series Vol. 1-3 (1991) and in doing so remembered how much I loved listening to that box set. And then I remembered this little warbling, muttery gem from Dylan in the mid-70s.

“Get What You Give” by The Men

In 2014, if you’d have asked me who the best band in the world was, I would’ve told you The Men. Their album Tomorrow’s Hits (2014) is still one of my favorite records of the 21st century (and it’s only 36 minutes long—geniuses) and, at 39, it hits me the same way it did when I was 28-29. This album was a lifeline for me when I was tethered to a desk at a job where no one spoke to each other and I had a daily quota of fact-checking at 15-20 reviews of books by self-published authors. You need music at a time like that.

“Little Bit Closer” by Sam Fender

Let me tell ya: Sam Fender took a class on Jeff Buckley’s Grace (1994) and passed with flying colors! This little tyke ain’t half bad. And that’s coming from someone who doesn’t even really like Jeff Buckley that much.

“I Can Love Her Anyway” by Ross Miller

A random bit of 1970s detritus I found on the byways of Spotify. Sounds like it could be a theme for a forgotten cop show or game show from 1974. This’ll probably be in Tarantino’s last movie whenever it comes out.

“Crackerbox Palace” by George Harrison

This is one of my 10 favorite George Harrison compositions. Yeah, I’m including Beatles songs in there. I don’t know what to say! For whatever reason, I find this song completely captivating and moving every time I listen to it. Harrison manages to convey the shambolic and mystifying quality of life in a (somewhat) goofy three minute song. I fucking love this thing.

“Chan” by Ramasandiran Somusundaram

This one is another song I happened across while perusing Spotify. Another lost track from the 1970s that brings me back to my days of scouring blogs for .RAR files of obscure records. Look, we’ve all got skeletons in our closets OK!

“Bad Times” by Sunny War

Read about this album, Armageddon In A Summer Dress (2025), on Allmusic since it was one of their Editor’s Choice selections this month. A nice bit of contemporary psych-rock.

“Dark Star” by Crosby, Stills & Nash

To be honest, I only put this song on the playlist because of the next song. But I will say that diving into the extended universe of albums from the CSN guys is a fascinating journey. Most of Neil Young’s albums are canonically great, but Crosby, Stills, and Nash have such a mixed bag of weird, awful, and great stuff (as Tom Scharpling dove into five years ago). This song falls into the latter territory.

“Praise” by Panda Bear

Big month for people who moved to Williamsburg in 2008 and were super into the major indie bands of that period! The period where Animal Collective was maybe the most important band in the world still feels like a fever dream. But your guy Panda Bear is back with Sinister Grift (2025), one of his best records—including all of the Animal Collective albums. On this one, Panda Bear leans into the CSN side of his hippie influences vs. Smile-era Brian Wilson or The Grateful Dead. Just so happy to have him back in my life. Sorry, just have to…wipe…the tears…from my eyes.

“Jupiter” by Nao

Another Allmusic Editor’s Choice here. Some solid neo-soul here. I think you’d call this neo-soul. Maybe I don’t actually know what neo-soul is.

“Magneto And Titanium Man” by Wings

The last song was called “Jupiter” and this song is from the Wings album Venus And Mars (1975). See what I did there? As I’ve mentioned, I just finished the second 700 book about several years in Paul McCartney’s life, so I spent a lot of pages reading about the recording sessions for Venus And Mars. Much of the album was recorded in New Orleans but this song was influenced by Paul reading Marvel comics on vacation in Jamaica. Let me tell you: This song is absolutely absurd and I freaking love it. But I’ll tell you something else: There is no musician, no human being on the planet Earth, who could sell the lines “Magneto said ‘Now the time come / To gather our forces and run’/ Oh no...This can't be so…” and make you feel something like Paul fucking McCartney. This song also sounds absolutely amazing.

“Leave It” by Mike McGear

Mike McGear is the pseudonym for Mike McCartney—Paul McCartney’s brother. You wanna guess how The McCartney Legacy, Volume II (1974-1980) starts? Yep, that’s right with Paul helping his brother write and record songs for his 1974 album McGear. This is one of the better songs on that album.

“Humanhood” by The Weather Station

I like the Weather Station. You have to admire a band who use Joni Mitchell’s Hejira (1976) as their mood board.

“Mystery Achievement” by The Pretenders

Back-to-back appearances by The Pretenders on these monthly playlists! Heard this one in my training gym. This song rocks.

“Bouncin’ Back (Bumpin’ Me Against The Wall)” by Mystikal

I also heard this one in my training gym. This song is absolutely bonkers. The production is peak Neptunes era stuff—absolutely wild. Ya know, life is very strange. Nothing brings me back to the anxious middle school dances with awkward sexual tension of my youth more than the sound of Mystikal’s voice. Is Mystikal my madeleine dipped in tea?

“Angel Eyes” by Alan Price

Speaking of legendary reveries. One day, I was in my kitchen doing something inefficiently, as I usually do, when my mind wandered. “Remember that day,” my mind went, “when you had finished getting your haircut at Gasper’s on Leonard Street and it was a beautiful early spring day in New York when it seemed like the city was starting to come alive and you had the itch to play pickup basketball but it was too late in the day to get your act together for that so instead you decided to go into a record shop on Metropolitan and linger and buy a few things and in that record shop you heard a strange, large 1970s sounding production come on and you couldn’t place it but you noted the lyrics and looked it up later and it was ‘City Lights’ from Between Today And Yesterday (1974) by Alan Price? Yeah, that was awesome—it’s been awhile since you listened to that.”

Alan Price was the keyboardist in the original Animals lineup who went on to have a modest solo career. “Angel Eyes” is a fun little song with a keyboard that sounds like a cat meowing. (If my friend Freimuth is reading this—Freimuth you’ll get a kick out of it.) The real heads will want to listen to “City Lights”—the swelling production that begins at 2:07 is the stuff people who love overproduced music from the 1970s dream of.

“Windy” by The Association

March has been very windy in Texas. This has caused several outbreaks of wildfires. We’ve been lucky not to be impacted. One windy Sunday, this song came on at our favorite local coffee shop. It made me think about a few things.

First, I asked my fiancee if they taught the phrase “March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb” in Texas.” Being from the northeast, this was a very important phrase for me as a child in terms of learning the rhythm of the year. She said they didn’t learn that in school.

Second, I thought about the song “Windy.” I was born in 1985 and my elementary school education was filled with references and signposts that carried the fading patina of the 1960s and 1970s. And I often wonder if my fiancee, who is seven years younger than me, experienced any of that. Maybe I watched Forrest Gump one too many times or something but, as a child, it always felt like the world around me was pointing to the earth tones and sounds of the 1960s and 1970s and how that way of life was beginning to recede with each new Dell or Gateway computer that was hauled into a middle class Long Island home.

In the third grade, we had a Grandparents Day ceremony at my elementary school in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. My teacher, Ms. Lane, had us sing “Wake Up Little Susie” to our grandparents. I know that’s from 1958 but, because it was the Everley Brothers, it was already gesturing toward 1965.

When I was a little older—about ten or 11—they had us sing “Windy” in chorus. I remember at the time finding it to be such a strange song. But it was a distillation of a feeling I still have a hard time articulating—of recent cultural history collapsing on you in a way that leaves a scent of what was once in the air but can never be revived.

I guess, like, if I taught kids how to sing Mystikal in a chorus class today that might be the same thing?

“Temple Bar” by Will Stratton

Read about this one on Allmusic as well. You give me a white guy singing a slightly melancholy song that’s produced like a track any of the Beatles would’ve released from 1968-1971 and its guaranteed to find its way onto one of these here playlists.

“Little by Little” by Suzanna Choffel

Turned on my car one afternoon and caught the tail end of this one on Sun Radio. Good tune.

“Love Takes Miles” by Cameron Winter

In March, Substack started serving me Notes from Walter Martin, the multi-instrumentalist and co-founder of The Walkmen. One of his recent Notes was about seeing Cameron Winter. Sure enough, after I finished listening to the new Panda Bear album one day, Spotify served some Cameron Winter up to me. A perfect distillation of the current moment: AI or algorithms serving content directly to you and cross-checking that content with the recommendation of a reliable human curator.

I like Cameron Winter—he’s a slurring Todd Rundgren. That’s high praise in my book.

“Suo Gân” by The Ambrosian Junior Choir

I intermittently listen to the Blank Check podcast. I don’t love the hosts as personalities but I find them amusing in doses. What sells me is the fact that they produce three hour long conversations about movies that I think are sick—such as Eyes Wide Shut (1999).

They’re revisiting the early films of Steven Speilberg right now (they did Speilberg’s entire filmography back in 2017) and a recent episode saw them covering Empire of the Sun (1987), which is one of my favorite movies.

This may be a controversial take but I think Empire of the Sun is one of Speilberg’s best movies. You might say it's a little messy in places, that it’s potentially emotionally manipulative, or that he refined his epic wartime storytelling in Schindler’s List (1993) or Saving Private Ryan (1998) but to that I’d say you’re missing the point.

This movie has the kind of Odyssey-style storytelling that I absolutely adore. A large journey filled with episodic encounters with universal character types that adds up to something more than each episode alone provides. Plus, it has the best child acting performance ever from Christian Bale. They articulate the unique quality of Bale’s performance well in the Blank Check podcast: When you watch him in this movie, you are not watching a child actor—you are watching the miniature version of adult Christian Bale. His performance now serves as an amazing time machine that allows you to live both in the past and the present simultaneously. There are moments in this film when he is doing things he will later do in Ford vs. Ferrari (2018). There is honestly nothing like it that I can think of.

John Malkovich’s performance in this movie is one of his absolute best. Malkovich’s energy within Speilberg’s vision is something to behold. Would’ve been nice to see them do something together another time.

This song is actually a Welsh (shouts to John Cale, Lloyd Alexander, and Fluellen) lullaby that is used to great effect as a kind of theme for the film which is about the Japanese invasion of China during World War II.

I’m not sure what it says about me that sometimes this tune comes into my head at random moments and I want to put a knee to the floor and weep.